Zoey was thrown forward, clutching the back of Echo’s seat as the helicopter lurched forward. She got a nice view out of the front window of the tower collapsing straight down, as if the whole building had fallen into a trapdoor. All else was obscured under a billowing cloud of dust and flying glass.
Will was yanking back on the stick and screaming commands at the machine, neither of which seemed to have any effect on its trajectory. The helicopter kept tilting forward at an alarming angle and Zoey was sure they were just going to somersault down into the falling avalanche of rubble below. Instead, the helicopter hovered, then kind of wobbled forward, nose still pointed down. Instead of plummeting into the maelstrom, they were now lurching horizontally—directly toward an office building across the street.
Will pulled up on the stick and stomped at some pedals, and Zoey could only sense that they were gaining altitude because the windows of the building they were about to collide with were whipping downward through the windshield. And then all at once they were looking at a rooftop—asphalt and duct work looking close enough to touch, the shadow of the rotor blades flitting along the surface. A flock of birds took off from the roof, and immediately one of them got hit by the rotors and exploded in a cloud of blood and feathers. Zoey heard someone in the helicopter screaming, and then realized it was all of them.
And then they were past the building and were looking down at the streets again, still leaning forward, still out of control. Pedestrians were pointing and running, for them the sound of the tower collapsing a block away now joined by the thunderous noise of the helicopter rotors chopping the air into submission overhead. Finally the helicopter’s front end rose and the horizon fell into view. It was too late—the next building filled the windshield and they weren’t going to avoid this one. Zoey barely had time to note that they were going to die colliding with a gigantic Santa Claus.
He was standing inside the hole of a thirty-story-tall donut, or rather, a thirty-story-tall glass building shaped like a donut standing on edge. It was a shopping mall, judging by how many of the terrified, fleeing people behind the windows were carrying shopping bags. Will yanked on the stick, presumably trying to avoid smashing into the building and sending the rotor blades flying murderously through a Lane Bryant store, but this meant he was aiming for the hole of the donut, and that meant he was aiming right for the ten-story-tall Santa Claus statue that was standing there. It was a festive thing, animated to rotate slowly, waving and jiggling its belly with laughter to the streets below. It was no hologram.
Zoey would never forget the noise the helicopter’s blades made when they started sawing into Santa’s neck. The statue was a hollow structure made of something like fiberglass over a thin metal frame, and the sound of the blades ripping through it was a series of thumps and screams, like a family of elves getting run over by a lawnmower. One of the rotor blades snapped and went flying, leaving a massive scar in the glass wall of the shopping mall.
They were crashing now, tumbling through the air. Zoey was thrown sideways, dangling from her seat belt. She had a fleeting thought that she wished she’d stolen one of the henchman’s helmets. The helicopter got clear of the wrecked Santa statue and now the skyline was whipping around outside the windshield. Will no longer had his hands on the stick. He, like everyone else, was grabbing whatever was nearby, resigned to the crash and trying to brace for impact.
Then there was a POP and a FWUMPH and suddenly everything outside the windows was yellow.
There was a massive jolt, Zoey bashing her head on the window next to her. There was a horrific noise like rapid cannon fire, the remaining rotors tearing themselves to pieces as they battered the ground. Then Zoey was upside down and then right side up again, thrown around under the seat belt, the remains of the helicopter slowly rolling to a stop.
An engine whined and sputtered to a halt.
And then, finally, silence.
They were sideways, Zoey and Echo on the bottom. There was muffled screaming from outside. Will breathed, ran his hand through his hair, and then nodded to himself as if to confirm the job had been done to his satisfaction.
He asked, “Everyone all right?” and, without looking to see if anyone was in fact all right, started yanking off his seat belt. He climbed out of the pilot’s-side door, which was pointing straight up at the sky.
He extended a hand down for Echo and said, “We have to move. He’ll be coming.”
Zoey checked her limbs to make sure they were there and not jutting out at weird angles, then climbed up and out. She heard air escaping, as the whole battered aircraft was being slowly lowered to the ground, thanks to four yellow plastic airbags that had inflated around the hull just prior to impact. Zoey climbed atop the hull of the helicopter—or what was left of it, the tail had snapped off and the rotor was now just four short ragged stubs—and found they had landed on the roof of a parking garage in the shadow of the donut mall.
They had left a trail of wrecked cars in their wake, and one of the loose rotor blades had impaled an empty school bus nearby. Zoey didn’t know which would be more traumatizing to the returning children: the skewered bus or the twenty-foot-tall severed head of Santa Claus next to it. It was lying on its side, one eye gouged out and its nose bashed in from having landed and rolled after being lopped off its body by the helicopter blades. The rest of the Santa was still standing next door, its headless body still slowly rotating and waving inside the giant crystal donut.
Beyond it, a cloud of dust filled the gap in the skyline where Livingston Tower once stood.